Javascript Gauntlet - RELEASED!

As a kid, my 3 favorite arcade games were Donkey Kong, Outrun, and Gauntlet. Last summer I had
a go at making an Outrun-style racer that turned out reasonably
well, so next up was Gauntlet.

I’ve been poking at it on-and-off for a couple of months and I think its in a reasonable state to
share with the world… with one really, really, important caveat:

IT’S SINGLEPLAYER ONLY!

I know, that’s utterly ridiculous, how can you make a Gauntlet game without multiplayer? But there are
only so many hours in the day (full disclosure, I also didn’t have time to do any cheesy speech synthesis -
so no “elf needs food badly” - sorry).

Now, I fully intend to build a multiplayer version, but I probably won’t get the time to tackle that
until later in the summer, but I didn’t want that to stop me from putting the single player version up
and writing up a few ‘how-to’ articles while it’s still fresh in my head.

So, with that mea-culpa out of the way, let’s play Javascript-Gauntlet:

Features

Play as Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard or Elf (press 1-4 to start a new game)

ARROW KEYS to move

HOLD SPACE to fire

ENTER to use potion

Lots of monsters - Ghosts, Demons, Grunts, Wizards and DEATH

Destroy monster generators before they spawn more monsters

Find the exit to the next level

Use keys to open doors

Eat & drink to restore health

Collect treasure for high score

Use potions to kill all monsters in view

8 Training Levels

10 Dungeon Levels

Music & Sound FX

For those of you who’ve never played Gauntlet before (for-shame, go watch the original arcade version in this video), its basically

kill or escape the overwhelming hordes of monsters

find the exit

survive as long as possible

get a high score

This version is not intended to be an exact Gauntlet-Clone. It’s my personal interpretation, mostly based
on my vague memories of the arcade and c64 versions. The levels are different, the graphics and sounds
are different, and the gameplay is different, but it follows the same pattern and is, I think, unmistakably Gauntlet.

If you are looking for an exact Gauntlet clone, you should go download the MAME emulator and find
the Gauntlet rom and go play it - it’s still awesome fun to play (way more than my version).

Limitations

Here are a couple more caveats to admit:

Modern browsers only - Chrome, Firefox, IE9/10

NO mobile support - If I wanted to build mobile I would go 100% native.

NO touch support - no mobile, no touch

NO endgame - exit from Dungeon Ten and you get a simple fade-to-black.

NO multiplayer - already talked about this one :-)

Performance - might be occasional stutter during garbage collection

How-it-works Articles

I’ll be at RailsConf in Portland all of this week (Apr 28th - May 2nd)
with the LiquidPlanner dev team, partaking in a whole-load of Ruby and Rails Web development
chit-chattery, but when I return, I hope to have some time to write up a number of “How-To” articles over the coming weeks,
covering such topics as:

Attributions

All music is licensed, royalty-free, from Lucky Lion Studios for this
project only. If you re-use this project for your own purposes you must license your own music please.
All sound effects are licensed, royalty-free from Premium Beat for
this project only. If you re-use this project for your own purposes you must license your own sound effects please.